People view - sort order

[hluxem]

Maintaining a sort by field becomes a lot of work once there are beyond 50 persons. I use first name last name for the unique tag, in general I would like to see the sorting based on last name first name. In addition to that, I like to see family members on top. I think there are less time consuming ways than creating manual sort entries to make sorting of people easy and flexible.

Could the sort options for people be extended to:

   • Manual, allow to drag entries up and down, create internal index, new persons added at the end (important to allow selecting multiple persons)
   • One button to switch between first name - last name or last name - first name with either automatic definition of last and first name (based on first/last space) or to split current name field to 3 fields, first, middle, last
   • Sort for unique tag
   • Sort for group and then unique tag or last/first or first/last?
   • Sort for sort entry

Thanks,

Heiner

[axel.hennig]

+1

[Mario]

That's why each person has a sort key. I did not want to overcomplicate things.
Less than 5% of all IMatch users ever open the sort profile editor, for example. Most users don't need complex or multiple sort methods. Most set "Default" or "By Date" and that's it.

My guess is that it will be the same for sorting People.
IMatch by default sorts by tag - and I'm quite sure that most people use First Name Last Name for the tag (or the country-specific expression).
The ability to control the sort order by the additional sort key in order to handle country-specific sort specialties or a preference for sorting by family name and then given name should be sufficient for many users.

Lets see who many users comment on this request.

[mastodon]

+1 a do a lot face tags, make persons and this sorting walhalla would be a nice feature

[Mario]

What is sorting walhalla?

Did you +1 the original feature request or did you comment on my comment?

[mastodon]

Sorry, I mean it would be a SUPER feature for our convenience.

[hluxem]

IMatch by default sorts by tag - and I'm quite sure that most people use First Name Last Name for the tag

I agree and think that's exactly the problem.
Most of the times I sort a list with names, I want to see them sorted by last name, that's the opposite of the tag most people use. I believe last - first as sort order is pretty common and more useful.

That's why each person has a sort key. I did not want to overcomplicate things.

Just think about it, we just got AI to detect faces or auto tag images. That's all about efficiency and letting the computer do the work.
In my opinion, sorting for people is just the opposite. I have to open and close a window for 650 persons to manually change the tag from first-last to last-first or come up with a numbering scheme. Better do it right the first time ......
I think that's ok for 10-20 people, not for several hundred. Once people start running face recognition on their databases this may become an issue for more people.

One of the reason I asked about modifying the json file with excel in another thread was to find an alternative way of manipulating a list of people. It would probably take me less than 5 minutes to modify the list of 650 people and could easily change it later.
There was also a question/FR to add a "Next" button to the person editor, I think that's another way to make this more efficient.

I for myself decided to leave this mostly alone for now and hope at some point there is a different way to do this.
 

[axel.hennig]

One of the reason I asked about modifying the json file with excel in another thread was to find an alternative way of manipulating a list of people.

That's why I made a semi-automatic Excel-file to import several hundrets of people in just a few seconds. My approach was:

• Export my People-category tree
• Import to Excel
• Link the exported names to my mobile-phone address-book to have the birthdate (and some other infos)
• Create a json-file
• Import into IMatch-People

To have this somehow already available in IMatch would be better since I believe a lot of us already have a People-category or People-keywords or...

[hluxem]

That's why I made a semi-automatic Excel-file to import several hundrets of people in just a few seconds.

Nice!

I was waiting for a FR request to import contacts :>), I guess you already created the solution.

I gave up with Excel as I was not able to do step 4, create a Json with Excel. Are you willing to share a sample file or instructions?

Thanks,

Heiner 

[axel.hennig]

Are you willing to share a sample file or instructions?

Hi Heiner,

please see attached zip-file.

What to do / what I did:

• I created some people and exported the json-file. This gave me the file 01...json.
• I reformatted 01...json to see the structure. This gave me 02...json.
• Open the Excel-file 03...xlsx, see what I did there, fill in your values...
• Replace line 31 to 35 in the json-file 04...json with the values in column H from the Excel-file.
• Import the "created" json-file in an IMatch test-DB.

Remarks: I had some problems with the birthday, because Excel reformatted the date to a number and then it was impossible to import the created json-file to IMatch.

Hopefully this helps you.

[hluxem]

Hello Axel,

Thanks you so much. This worked really nice and saved me a lot of time. I decided to start over and converted the Imatch 2019 database again. I did set the preferences for automatic face recognition set to no this time.
The process works really nice for an initial set up, too bad it only works for new people.

As an alternative to manipulating people in Imatch I would be happy to have an export/import list feature. The list could be modified in Excel and then used to update safe fields like sort by, group ect.

Thanks again,

Heiner 

[Mees Dekker]

Is there any news on this?

[Mario]

I have no plans to make any changes to how people are sorted at this time.
Users have full control over the sort sequence using the sort key, which allows to handle even very complex sort requirements.
The average number of persons managed is between 60 and 80, so I think more sophisticated ways to arrange, group and order features for persons are not really required. Maybe this comes as part of the people enhancements planned for a later edition of IMatch